


The Fragile Earth

by inkandpaperhowl



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen, Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-16
Updated: 2013-02-16
Packaged: 2017-11-29 10:51:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/686105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkandpaperhowl/pseuds/inkandpaperhowl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Doctor and the Master disagree on many things, and one of those is Earth's beauty: too beautiful to exist, or too beautiful to destroy?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fragile Earth

** The Fragile Earth **

The Earth hangs in the sky like a blown glass ball. Beautiful, intricate, so breakable. The china-blue of the seas swirls endlessly with the thin, white clouds of atmosphere, china patterns and designs tracing their way across the face of the planet. Brittle like ceramic, it would break if dropped. Delicate as porcelain. As fragile as glass.

The Doctor looked down on the fragile Earth from the TARDIS, and smiled. He watched it spin around and around like a china top, amazed that such a frail place could sustain life. And the people who clung to the surface of that spinning world never ceased to surprise him, to make him question if they really were as breakable as they looked. For they did look breakable. And so helpless. Defenseless. Their porcelain Earth, it seemed, was not strong enough to hold them, and what little strength it did have, they drained. But he couldn't hate them for how they changed the intricate patterns in the china of their globe. It would have been so easy for him to destroy it, to shatter it, to return it to sand and lightning. But they were all he had left, and he had decided long ago to protect them, and their ceramic world. So he did the best he could to mend the cracks in the glass. For it was too beautiful, too precious, too brilliant. Far too beautiful to be destroyed. Because with Gallifrey gone, Earth seemed to be the only beauty left hanging so perfectly in the sky.

The Master looked down on the fragile Earth from the  _Valiant_ , and smiled. The world sat in his palm like a songbird, singing of freedom it thought it had. But simply close his hand, squeeze the life from it…he smiled at the thought of the satisfying crunch. He would wrap his fist around this tiny planet and crush it into dust. He would drop this china globe and watch as it shattered, laugh as the pieces scattered, before reducing the shards to dust and the dust to nothing. And when Lucy asked him breathlessly,  _why?_  he would smile as he replied:  _Because I can_. Because that porcelain world was just too easy to break, those ceramic people were too easy to shatter. Because Earth was far too beautiful to remain hanging so perfectly in the sky when Gallifrey was gone.

The Earth hangs in the sky like a blown glass ball. Too beautiful to exist, too beautiful to destroy. Brittle like ceramic, it would break if dropped. Delicate as porcelain. As fragile as glass…


End file.
